Embarking on your first trip to create a video montage for a wedding, bar or bat mitzvah, sweet 16 or quinceañeras can at first glance seem like an exciting adventure, a trip west to new countries that seem open and inviting. ..
And then you come across these hostile terms.
4: 3; 16: 9; big screen; full screen; NTSC; BOYFRIEND; dpi; fps; drop frame; anti-fall frame; hi-def; standard-def; import; export; HDMI; RCA; S-Video; Component input / output; Mpeg4; Quick Time; WAV, oh there!
Foreign words, numbers and lingo come flying at you in a way that will make your head spin!
Fortunately, this Thanksgiving, I'm here to help you make peace with the alien conditions; help you sit around the video montage presentation table with abbreviations, numbers and terms as friends, ready to speak fluently in technical discussions. Or, at least well enough to know how to pass the farce.
In this first part of the series, I'll focus on getting started and how to create the edit itself, and record the discussion of editing, mastering, and projecting for the continuing series of tutorials.
So roll up your sleeves and get your pencils or keyboards ready!
Whatever software you use to create your video edit, one of the first things you may come across is choosing between NTSC or PAL. Here in the US, most systems will automatically configure you to NTSC with PAL being a choice you can choose. Do not do that. Unless you're creating this montage to play for someone in a country outside of the United States, you want to stay in NTSC. It is the video system that was created here decades ago when television and broadcast system were invented.
American engineers developed standards to make equipment compatible and have maintained these standards through the evolution of the film and video industry and its constantly improving product lines of cameras, television, broadcast equipment (cable , satellite) and software delivery systems such as VHS, DVD, Blu-Ray, etc. At the time, the Europeans were following the United States, developing their TV system in a similar way, slightly improving some of the standards, although the difference was relatively insignificant. For example, instead of 24 frames per second (fps), their cameras run at 25 fps. The difference only serves to make the equipment incompatible, which you may have noticed if you have traveled abroad and tried to play DVD on a foreign DVD player. It doesn't work, mate!
The next choice you will likely come across is whether or not to set your project to 4: 3 or 16: 9. Your system may ask this question in another way as well, such as full screen or wide screen. 4: 3 and full screen are in this case essentially interchangeable, and the same is true with 16: 9 and the big screen.
To put it simply, 4: 3 / fullscreen will create your video editing project closer to a square shape, the kind of shape that older TVs come in, while 16: 9 / widescreen will create your project in more of a rectangle. shape, the kind of shape of newer televisions where it's wider, more like a movie screen.
Here is the thing. For video editing presentations, either choice is acceptable.
You may be thinking, "Well I want to go to 16: 9 just like my beautiful widescreen HDTV. I'm from the present, even the future, not stuck in the past with an old TV that has bunny ears sticking out of it."
Well, wait a second, partner.
How you make your choice is best determined by the material you use for the assembly. Most likely, 4: 3 / full screen will actually be a better choice for you more often than not, and I'll tell you why. If you are working with historical video footage that has been shot over the years, most or all of that footage will have been created in 4: 3 / full screen. So if you set your project up to be widescreen, you are either going to either just add those black bars to the sides or stretch the image to fill the larger screen, which will make your woman look fatter, which will not certainly won't. help your relationship.
The same goes for photographs. Most of the photographs you'll be working with for an edit are closer to 4: 3 than 16: 9, although a bit of cropping is needed for either. Cropping, however, becomes more difficult for 16: 9 when a photo was taken in portrait mode, meaning larger in your hand like a person standing, rather than wider. Photo frames are often ready to sit on your table anyway to suit the way the camera was rotated when shooting. For a montage, when it's a portrait, if you want to see the whole photo, you'll have a lot of black space on either side - and even more with 16: 9 than 4: 3.
But if you create a montage that is mostly based on newly captured video, captured with a high definition video camera, chances are the footage is already widescreen - or as you would correctly put it, “natively” 16: 9. In this case, then choose widescreen for your aspect ratio, also called aspect ratio. Photographs will be nicely cropped at this size and with portraits you can either crop a 16: 9 section of the photo or deal with the black bars.
Don't worry - no matter which format you choose, your edit will still play fine on all TVs, projectors and the internet. The shape will be adjusted in a slightly different way to suit the way it is displayed.
This format issue leads us to your next choice. Hi-def or standard def. Once again, you might think you want to create your montage in high definition so everyone can see how beautiful your family is ... every smile, wink and dimple.
But the same questions still apply.
Is the source material you are working with high definition? This question focuses primarily on video footage, as photos can be high resolution and look stunning in high definition, assuming they were originally taken in high resolution on a digital camera or scanned from a print. at high resolution, which in this case is known as dpi or dots per inch (the higher the dpi number, the higher the resolution). If the video footage was not shot in high definition, but rather in standard definition - (essentially good quality before high definition), it won't look better if you create your project in high definition. In fact, it might look worse if it was stretched to fill the widescreen format required by high definition. Some TVs and DVD players tout their ability to switch to high definition, but the reality is that your video image will never improve in quality, it can, at best, maintain that quality only when enlarged to a high standard. larger size.
The other downside to editing your edit in high definition is that it will require more memory and a faster, more powerful computer to process the data while you work. It can actually slow down your editing process and lead to a higher level of frustration. How new is your computer and how fast is the processor?
So if your video is standard definition video, it's probably better to create your “standard def” edit. When later in this series of articles I cover showing your montage at a live event, that same discussion will have its final conclusion of which projection way best matches how the montage was created. - with regard to the aspect ratio and the high definition / standard def. Suffice it to say, if you are projecting your edit from a standard DVD, it can't be high definition anyway.
And if you plan on uploading the montage to watch on YouTube, once again the standard definition will be of sufficiently high quality and in fact, it will probably be cut off from there! Once you are in high definition you have to go all the way and follow it to the finished product and presentation to reap the benefits otherwise you are wasting your time worrying about high definition for nothing! Remember that even if you do a simple photo montage without video footage, you have to think about the end of the game that projects it at your event, and the project should be set up appropriately depending on how it will be. present.
Your editing system may also offer you a choice of audio settings. Some do, some don't. If you need to choose between non-drop-frame and drop-frame images (which affect both video and audio), select drop-frame as this is probably the best choice for most video applications. which do not require working with images on real film, i.e. 35mm or 16mm motion picture film. Other audio setting choices can be a choice of 48K or 32K, 16 bit or 12 bit. All of them are acceptable, however, given the options, I would recommend going with 48K and 16 bit. Rather than giving a technical explanation on this, I suggest you just nod your head and take my advice. On more non-professional home systems (which may work well for your needs), these choices may not even present themselves.
Your project is now set up, you are probably working in NTSC and have chosen either 4: 3 / full frame or 16: 9 / widescreen and you are ready to start creating your edit. Before you start to channel your inner Steven Spielberg, you must first incorporate the material into your project. That is, still photographs and video footage, and on most systems this will be a variation of the term "import". A common thread for importing video is the ability of most video cameras to connect directly to your computer via a Firewire cable, allowing video footage to be imported directly into your project.
If the footage was created digitally, a conversion of the digital files to the format needed for your editing system will also be an import function. Each system will have its slightly unique way of doing it, with PC systems and Mac based software approaching this in their own way, and unfortunately this series would become difficult to explain all the different programs and setups to get your hardware. loaded and / or accessible.
So like watching a Julia Childs cooking show, you'll have to go get all of your ingredients yourself and put them on your table, and then in the next part of this series you'll be ready to actually start learning how to cook. your soufflé, whether it is a photo montage type only, or a montage combining photographs and video.
Happy Thanksgiving and happy editing!
Stay tuned for the Tech Talk Tutorial part 2 video edits ...